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Hello everyone,
A couple of days ago, I got a request from a web hosting company that wants to advertise on my site, but they wanted a test run. So, I gave them 5 free days of advertising. Right now, it's just the second day but I'm a little bit alarmed.

Their banners get very low CTR, like .5%

Why is that? Their banners are made very well and they are placed on the top of each page.

Check out the banners and my site here and please tell me something that I can do to increase the CTR:

The first one: There's no incentive to click. If I'm interested I probably have some sort of hosting already (free or paid): How many megs? What features? I need DETAILS before I get interested enough to click.

Second banner: Hate it. Makes no sense. Doesn't look like an error (no buttons, etc). No incentive to click.

0.5% is very poor then. I would suggest you contact the advertiser, and request different banners to put into rotation for the remainder of the test campaign. That's what I would, and in fact do do, with all my advertisers. It is the responsibility of not only the publisher, but advertiser as well, to try and maximize the performance of the ad campaign.

Yeah I know, that 0.5 is very poor, but do you have any other comments about the banners above?

Or how about this? If somebody can design a banner for site5.com that will get 1.5+ CTR, I will give you 5,000 button impressions on http://echodev.com. If the banner will get 2.5%+ CTR, I will give you 20,000 button impressions...

The banner can be animated, but please keep within the size limit - 10-12KB.

You can send the banner to webmaster@echodev.com. I will test it for a couple of days and if it'll work, I will send you an email about it.